Stephanie Donelson

A lot of brands rely on a set-it-and-forget-it approach to digital marketing to ensure consistency across marketing channels. While this approach does help in some sense that you always have content, it can get stale or results will slow as people start to tune out your marketing messages.

Have you noticed a dip in results in your digital marketing strategy?

Let’s take a look at four common signs that your digital marketing strategy needs a refresh or some of your campaigns need a little facelift.

1. Poor website traffic and/or engagement

A drop in website traffic or engagement is often the biggest indicator your digital marketing strategy needs some help. If fewer people are visiting or those visitors are bouncing or spending just seconds on your site, it’s a sign your marketing isn’t working the way it should be.

Don’t worry, we’ll go through some things to check on your site to see if you can get those metrics back up!

Checklist items for poor website traffic or engagement:

• SEO: Are your targeted keywords still relevant to your target demographics? Are your webpages optimized for the right keywords? Is your meta data clickable and optimized? Run a full SEO audit to see if some small changes can make a huge difference in your organic search results.
• Website audit: Is it time for a refresh of your website’s content or even its structure? Perhaps your navigation isn’t as user-friendly as it used to be as your brand has grown or changed. Is your website content organized in a thoughtful manner? Is your website content still relevant and useful? Are you linking to your own internal pages enough?
• Chatbot: One easy way to find out if your website needs help and to put a band aid on the problem while you do a full website audit is to add a chatbot to your site. The chatbot can help people find the information they need immediately instead of clicking around for 15 minutes and you can get a better understanding of what people are looking for in the first place to help you structure your navigation and nesting better.
• A/B testing: Is it your website’s content that’s causing the problem and driving high bounce rates or low engagement scores? Start building A/B tests into your landing pages to see what works with your target demographic and apply the results across the site.
• PPC: Low traffic and website engagement can also be attributed to poor PPC campaigns or ad copy. Make sure your PPC ads deliver on the promise and give the user the content they were looking for and that the content matches their search query.
• Email campaigns: Emails are a great referral channel for websites but like PPC, if expectations are set incorrectly you can see low engagement on the site from this source. Email links should always have UTMs so you can track what campaign those visitors came from and check the email itself to investigate what’s going on.
• Sponsored content: Is your own content not getting the hits you want? Why not work with a trusted name in your industry and host your content on a website that has the authority to get eyes on it?
• Interactive content: Finally, you can look into creating interactive content on your website to improve engagement metrics and provide one-of-a-kind content people will want to visit your website to use.

2. Low lead generation/conversions

Seeing fewer leads coming into your database or fewer conversions taking place on your website? That’s a flashing neon sign that marketing is not working the way it should unless you’ve already captured 100% of your marketable target audience. But then you wouldn’t be reading this blog post!

If you’re seeing a drop in conversions or leads, there are some quick things you can do to bring those numbers back up.

Checklist items for low lead generation/conversions:

• CPA: Take a close look at your CPA or Cost per Acquisition. This can help you understand where leads are coming from so you can focus your efforts on improving those channels and dropping low performers for the time being.
• Sponsored content: I mentioned sponsored content earlier in the website section, but sponsored content can also be great for improving lead generation. Share a chapter of a new eBook as an article on a trusted partner’s website and then have the CTA be to download the full eBook back on your site. Or look at testing new forms of sponsored content, like podcast sponsorships or dedicated email blasts.
• New advertising partners: Maybe you’re preaching to the choir and your audience is already buying what you’re selling. Look for new advertising partners in your industry or promote content on third-party sites to reach new audiences who might not be familiar with your brand yet.
• PPC: Your PPC campaigns should be big drivers of leads and website conversions but if they’re not it’s time to give them a refresh. Most often it’s going to come down to the ad copy, keywords, and CTA in your ad and ensuring it matches the landing page you’re sending people to. They all have to match and follow a seamless transition.
• Social media (paid and organic): Social media can be a great asset for driving leads to your website or into your database. Run an audit on your social media channels to make sure you’re using all the tools you can effectively, like contact forms or website links, and to ensure your posts are selling your lead generation content and encouraging people to convert.
• Live chat: Here’s another opportunity for a chatbot or live chat to help people find what they’re looking or get added to your database so sales can follow up directly.
• Website audit: Finally, a website audit might be in order to make sure people are finding your gated content or finding the right forms they’re looking for, like contacting sales. You should also run an audit on the forms themselves and your marketing automation tool to check that everything is still synced up correctly.

3. Poor social engagement

Social engagement is a fantastic metric to watch to see if your marketing messages are resonating with your audience. But, if you’re noticing you’ve still got decent impressions on your social media posts but no one is reacting, commenting, or sharing it might be time to dive deeper into your social media marketing and see what needs to change.

Checklist items for poor social engagement:

• Tag content: Many social media scheduling tools allow you to add tags to your posts so you can analyze results by campaign, topic, theme, or post type. It’s up to you how you tag your posts, but start adding them to your process so you can see what content or topics work well with your audience as well as analyze if specific social media copy improves engagement or not.
• Increase posting: The lifespan of social media posts isn’t very long. At best you’ll get up to a day or so on LinkedIn. At worst, about 15 minutes on Twitter. Increase your posting frequency to see if you can drive engagement as followers become more used to seeing your name in their feed.
• Change it up: Perhaps you only ever share links to your website or quick videos. It’s time to test new content formats and post copy to catch people’s attention. Utilize the polls feature on LinkedIn or Twitter or try adding a GIF or meme to a Twitter post. Shorten your post copy to just a sentence or a simple question to drive up people’s curiosity and make them have to click your links.
• Engagement rate: Run an audit on your past posts and sort by engagement rate. What do those posts have in common? How can you replicate those high-performers in the future?
• Social channels: It might also be time to evaluate if the social channels you’re using are effective or relevant to your audience. Are you spending a lot of time on Facebook but seeing little return? It’s okay to leave the network and focus your efforts on channels that do perform well for you, like Instagram or LinkedIn. It could also be time to get online on a new social channel – as long as your audience is there.

4. Dead-end content

Dead-end content is exactly what it says it is, it’s content that doesn’t have a next step. Every piece of content should fit into the buyer’s journey and tell the buyer what to do next, even if it’s a simple contact sales CTA.

You don’t want people scrolling your site’s content, getting to the end and realizing there’s nothing left for them to do on your site so they click away.

Checklist items for dead-end content:

• Fulfillment email: Do you send fulfillment emails when people download eBooks or watch webinar recordings? Help them find the next step of their journey by emailing it right to them.
• Related content: Are you utilizing related content on your website? Related content can help keep them on your site, provides a logical next step, and gives them the choice to choose what they want to watch, listen to, or read next. I like to offer a few options in related content as not everyone consumes content in the same way. Maybe I’ll link to another blog, or a video, or an infographic so they can choose how they want the information conveyed.
• Closing CTA: Check to make sure you have a CTA on every piece of content.
• Pop-up: Another option is to add a form fill pop-up to your content that enrolls them in a nurture stream so they’ll continue to hear from you but they can bounce out of your site in the meantime. This tactic must be clearly communicated that they will get a series of emails from you otherwise you could just end up making some visitors mad and annoyed with your brand.

What other signs do you watch out for to see if your digital marketing strategy needs a refresh? Sound off in the comments below!